Philosophy, Faith, and the Real World

Tag Archives: science

Over the years I have developed dozens of strategies for getting students to participate in class discussions; the most reliable technique undoubtedly is to get them talking about their pets. Case in point: A couple of classes ago the article for the day for my ethics classes was by biologist Frans de Waal; his decades of studying chimpanzee behavior have convinced him that we can learn a lot about the foundations of the moral life—a life often considered to be exclusively available to human beings—from observing non-human primates. Although 99.8% of our DNA is identical to that of chimpanzees, we tend to be exceptionalist about the moral life—only human beings are capable of it. Yet de Waal points out that features fundamental to the moral life, including empathy, deference to the needs of others, cooperation, deliberation and more are frequently on display in chimpanzee interactions. He expresses one of his conclusions by asking

Would it be realistic to ask people to be considerate of others if we had not already a natural inclination to do so? . . . [Humans] started out with moral sentiments and intuitions, which is also where we find the greatest continuity with other primates. Rather than having developed morality from scratch, we received a huge helping hand from our background as social animals.

Knowing that few, if any, of my students were likely to have a chimpanzee at home, I decided to go a notch or two farther out the biological spectrum and asked how many of them had a dog or a cat at home. Almost every hand went up. How many people thought that their dog or cat was capable of morally relevant deliberation? Almost every hand went up. And the stories began.

There is, for instance, the dog who is banned from laying on the living room furniture. She is perfectly obedient concerning this prohibition until she thinks everyone is upstairs. When she believes she is not being observed, she jumps on the nearest piece of furniture—but was caught by the Dog Camera. This, I told my students, is a canine version of Gyges and the ring of invisibility story from Plato’s Republic—how differently would you act from your law- and moral-rules-abiding norms if you thought no one was watching? Then there is the dog who chooses which human family member to sit with while watching television according to which one of them took him for a walk that day. He chooses not to sit with the most recent walk companion, since the dog apparently wants to make sure that everyone in the family gets equal snout time with him.

Every dog owner believes that their dog is capable of high-level thought, but has also had the experience, as Daniel Dennett describes it, “of looking deeply into your dog’s eyes and realizing that no one is home.” Although dog-lovers don’t want to hear it, it is likely that the majority of our examples of canine intelligence on display are actually cases of humans anthropomorphically projecting intelligence where it doesn’t really belong. When my dog acts in a manner that, if I acted that way, would be explained by my ability to deliberate and think, I assume that she must be thinking when she acts that way. But biologists and animal behaviorists tell us that apparently intelligent behavior can almost always be explained without assuming any high-level thought being involved at all. It’s sort of like finding out that the apparent design of our world can be explained by natural processes without referring to an overall designer. Most of us don’t want to hear it—but that doesn’t make it any less true.

But the author of our article for class the other day wasn’t claiming that non-human animals use high-order reasoning when they behave in ways that reflect moral sensibilities. His claim, rather, was that their moral behavior comes from their ability to feel—to empathize, care about things other than themselves, even to sacrifice their own interests in deference to the interests or needs of others. It is this capacity to feel—an ability that we share with our animal brothers and sisters—that arguably serves as the foundation of moral behavior, whether the animal in question is capable of high-order reasoning or not. When I asked my students for examples of canine empathy rather than rationality, there once again was no shortage of stories. Many of the stories were strikingly similar to what Jeanne and I have observed over the past several years in our three dog pack at home. Our dachshund Frieda, for instance, behaves in an obviously empathetic manner when someone in the house, dog or human, is in distress. Several years ago my youngest son Justin was diagnosed with cancer (fortunately he has been cancer-free now for a few years). When he returned from radiation sessions, he would collapse in exhaustion on his bed or on the couch. Frieda, who under normal circumstances did not give Justin the time of day, would immediately burrow herself next to him so he could absorb her warmth and positive vibes. Frieda acted similarly when Jeanne was recovering from hip-replacement surgery and, most recently, when I broke my leg in a bicycling mishap. Frieda, who under normal circumstances is all about herself and manipulating others to her will, becomes an ambassador of empathy and caring when someone is in need.

But just as with human beings, not all dogs are created equal with it comes to the empathy scale. Once Jeanne and I were walking Frieda with our other dachshund, Winnie, when, a couple of blocks from home, I tripped on an uneven portion of the sidewalk and fell flat on my face. Literally—my forehead bounced off the pavement. Frieda’s reaction was, on the one hand, to stick her face in front of mine, lick me, and sit next to me as I woozily tried to get up. Winnie, on the other hand, said “I’m outta here!” and galloped the two or three blocks home as fast as her three-inch legs could carry her. It was the difference between “Dad! Are you all right???” and “Every man for himself!!”—just as we find in the human world.

I finally had to call an end to pet stories in class or we would never have gotten anything else done. I then asked my students to consider which is more important to the moral life: Reason or sentiments? Our ability to think or our ability to feel? After some discussion in small groups they reported back, predictably, that both are important—but if forced to choose between reason and sentiment as more important, feelings won out. Although this flies in the face of some of the most powerful and influential moral theories ever proposed by philosophers (Immanuel Kant, for instance), it squares well both with what some other philosophers have thought (David Hume, for instance) and—more importantly—with our experiences and intuitions. Our shared evolutionary history with other animals laid the foundations for our complex and sophisticated moral capacities. When we want to see where morality comes from we need only observe our canine family members. It turns out that someone is home after all.

Each of us can point to a time (or several times) in our past when we made a decision that, in retrospect, significantly shaped our lives going forward. Such decisions for me include getting married at one month past twenty, choosing to leave law school for a masters program in philosophy, and deciding to commit for life in my early thirties to a person whom I had known for six weeks. I could have chosen differently in each of these cases, and my life would be much different now than it is. But could I really have chosen otherwise? The answer of many “experts” from psychology, science, philosophy, and more is “no.”

I wrote about how the “experts” have gradually but inexorably come to this conclusion a week ago, describing how evidence from Darwin to neuroscience supports the conclusion that everything about me, including all of my choices, is fully determined by both biological and environmental causes beyond my control.

I undoubtedly, the experts admit, will continue to believe that some of my choices are free in the sense that I could have chosen otherwise, but that belief is based on an illusion. My choices may feel free, but they really aren’t. If true, the news that free will—the foundation of what most of us believe concerning morality, reward, punishment, praise, blame, and responsibility—is an illusion cannot be taken lightly. Nor, I would argue, need I either as a philosopher or a human being believe that the “experts” are right about this. Free will is only an illusion if one accepts the starting assumptions that energize the argument against human beings having real free will, assumptions that include the belief that everything that exists is made of physical matter, that physical matter is governed by inexorable physical laws, and that we generally know what those laws are. These assumptions are so entrenched among the “experts” that challenging them is as uphill a battle as trying to argue that the earth is flat. But I’ll give it a shot.

I often tell my students that each person, among her or his beliefs, has a small handful of what Aristotle called “first principles.” Aristotle knew as much about cause and effect as anyone;ō indeed, he arguably invented our familiar system of logic that is built on the belief that we live in a world governed by cause and effect relationships. These relationships shape how our beliefs hang together as well. Consider the following conversation:

Me: I believe A is true.

You: Why?

Me: Because A depends on B, and I believe B is true.

You: Why?

Me: Because B depends on C, and I believe C is true.

You: Why?

There’s a pattern here. We all seek to support our beliefs by referring to connected and deeper beliefs on which they depend. There’s also a problem here, though. The chain of cause and effect has to end somewhere if we are to avoid the dreaded “infinite regress.” So eventually we get this:

Me: I believe that X is true because X depends on Z, and I believe Z is true.

You: Why? (you’re getting really annoying, by the way)

Me: Because I do.

In Aristotle’s terminology, I have just identified “Z” as one of my first principles. In order to avoid an infinite regress, eventually we arrive at a belief for which we seek no further justification than that we believe it. Such first principles vary from person to person–some common ones include “Human life is intrinsically valuable,” “Human beings are fundamentally equal,” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” For many, including myself, “Human beings have the capacity to choose freely, choices that are not entirely determined by matters outside their control” is another first principle which, if true, stands in direct opposition to what the “experts” claim the truth to be. And like it or not, no one wants to hear that a first principle is an illusion.

When I choose freely, I deliberate between available options, weigh the evidence supporting and against each, and choose the option that best satisfies my operational criteria. I cause the choice, in other words, influenced but not determined by any number of factors. This simple idea—that a human being can choose without the choice being fully determined—violates assumptions so prevalent among the “experts” that it is tantamount to heresy. And to be sure, this simple idea is indeed a radical one, for it claims that the freely choosing human being is an exception to the inexorable laws of matter, capable of starting her or his own chain of causation that would not have happened without the choice starting the chain. There are few beings in the annals of philosophy with this power. Aristotle called his creating force—what we might call “God”—the “unmoved mover” or “the first cause uncaused,” the place where the chain of causation begins (or ends if one is going backwards). In short, human beings act “in loco parentis,” with the causal power of the divine itself, when we make free choices. If one wants to go religious, it is this very creative power of free choice that the sacred texts are referring to when they claim that human beings are “created in the image of God.”

The position that truly free choices step meaningfully outside the laws of nature has been called “metaphysically peculiar” by some philosophers, simply “bullshit” by others. Free will deniers assume that any human capacity that purportedly steps outside the laws of physical matter must be an illusion, since we all know that everything is made of matter and that matter is governed by deterministic laws. To which I respond, as I often do, in the words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Presuming that everything in heaven and earth can be reduced to the confines of our current understanding of reality is hubris of breathtaking proportions. When a fundamental and definitive human ability is defined out of existence because of narrow assumptions, I choose to question the assumptions rather than the reality of the fundamental human ability. When answers to a question do not square with our strongest intuitions and beliefs about ourselves, change the question.

None of the above is very philosophical of me, at least not in the contemporary sense. I freely (J) admit that human free choice might be an illusion, but I see no reason to believe so based on an argument with questionable assumptions. I choose rather to embrace the mystery and miracle of being human and believe, until better contrary evidence is provided, in keeping with the intuitions of billions of human beings that at least some human choices make a difference—such a great difference that they make the world a different place than it would have otherwise been. And human beings are not just vehicles of that change—their choices cause that change. Maybe we just don’t know enough about reality to rule out abilities that don’t square with our current understanding of things. Maybe human beings are truly the crowning glory of creation, endowed with a spark of the divine that reveals itself in our most basic capacities. Maybe all of the above. Take your pick. As Jean-Paul Sartre used to say, “You are free, therefore choose.”

Fifteen or more years ago my professional writing and research interests were largely focused on the philosophical implications of various interesting and important issues in the sciences, particularly the theory of natural selection in biology and philosophy’s contributions to cognitive science (an interdisciplinary investigation of consciousness and the brain involving biology, neuroscience, physics, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and several other disciplines). For a number of reasons my professional research and writing energies have shifted over the years, but I still have a fond place in my heart for the intersection of philosophy and science. So when I read an essayist the other day compare the Christian claim that Jesus was both human and divine to the famous “uncertainty principle” in physics, my virtual ears perked up. With apologies in advance for oversimplification to my colleagues and friends in various physics departments, let’s take a look.

The uncertainty principle was introduced by Werner Heisenberg in 1927 as a statement of one of the most fascinating and mind-bending features of the world of quantum physics. The principle states that the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa. In other words, you cannot know both the position and the speed of a particle at the same time. The notion that two directly measurable quantities of the same physical particle cannot be nailed down simultaneously sounds odd, to say the least, but philosophers have long grappled with the problem of how to handle two truths that are both obviously and logically true yet are incompatible with each other.

Dualistic philosophers, for example, claim that a human being consists of two fundamentally incompatible things, a physical body and a non-physical mind. Yet we know experientially that our bodies and minds interact with each other all the time—something mind and body should not be able to do if they are substantially different. So are they really different sorts of things or not? Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia once pressed the great René Descartes so vigorously on this in their letter correspondence–How can mind and body be different substances and still interact in the human person?—that he finally wrote, in essence, “I don’t know. They just do.” Not a great philosophical argument, but at least he tried.

Which brings me back to the Ian Frazier essay I mentioned in the first paragraph that got me to thinking about all of this. Frazier writes that

Whatever Jesus actually looked like, trying to adjust him to any physical image is misleading, because he was both God and man. This concept is so powerful, yet so challenging, to hold in the mind that whole huge heresies have thrown in the towel and simply picked one side or the other. I try to think of Jesus as being a sort of oscillation between the two. A similar idea in physics is the uncertainty principle, which says you cannot know both the position and the speed of a particle at the same time. Jesus was God and man oscillating back and forth—either and both, both or either, simultaneously.

That’s a peculiar notion, to say the least—I’m kind of picturing Jesus in an endless dance between two incompatible states at such speed as to make mere mortals unable to tell that he’s moving at all. I’m not sure it’s very helpful theologically. But this got me to thinking about another possible application of quantum craziness to Christianity: “Uncertainty Principle Jesus” is nothing when compared to another hybrid of Christianity and physics: “Schrödinger’s God.”

One of the strangest features of quantum physics is that atom or photon can exist as a combination of multiple states corresponding to different possible outcomes—a situation called a “quantum superposition.” We know that superposition actually occurs at the subatomic level, because there are observable instances in which a single particle is demonstrated to be in multiple locations at the same time. One of the leading quantum theory interpretations says that an atom or photon remains in this indeterminate superposition until it is observed, before which only probabilities can be predicted. We cannot know with certainty ahead of time which of the various states the atom or photon will settle into. The act of measurement affects the system, causing the set of probabilities to reduce to only one of the possible values immediately after the measurement. Yet another demonstration of the apparent conflict between what quantum theory tells us is true about the nature and behavior of matter on the microscopic level and what we observe to be true about the nature and behavior of matter on the macroscopic level — everything visible to the unaided human eye.

In 1935 Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger came up with a thought experiment that drives the point home directly, a thought experiment that has come to be known as Schrödinger’s Cat. Place a living cat into a steel chamber, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid, a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the test period, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will, in turn, break the vial and kill the cat.

But given quantum superposition, we cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and consequently cannot know whether the vial has been broken, the hydrocyanic acid released, and the cat killed. Since we cannot know, according to the quantum superposition of states, the cat is both dead and alive. It is only when we break open the box and learn the condition of the cat that the superposition is lost, and the cat becomes one or the other (dead or alive). This situation is sometimes called quantum indeterminacy or the observer’s paradox: the observation or measurement itself affects an outcome, so that the outcome as such does not exist unless the measurement is made.

Scientists, philosophers, and fiction writers have had a field day with Schrödinger’s poor cat for the past eighty years; Schrödinger himself is rumored to have said, later in life, that he wished he had never met that cat. Further discussion of the scientific implications of a world in which things at a foundational level are radically uncertain until we interact with them is well above my knowledge and pay grade. But transfer Schrödinger’s thought experiment to a classic question from an entirely different field of human inquiry: Does God exist? The traditional and common sense assumption is that there is a solid “yes” or “no” answer to this question—something either exists or it doesn’t, right? The issue then becomes “what do you mean by ‘God’?’ and “what evidence do you consider to be relevant to the question?” The fact that things immediately spin out of control in terms of complication and confusion does not obviate the fact that the original question—Does God exist?—sounds for all the world like a simple “yes” or “no” sort of question.

But in a Schrödinger world, even that isn’t clear. Just as in a world of physical indeterminacy Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead until someone looks, so in a world of theological indeterminacy God both exists and does not exist—until someone looks. As long as the discussion is abstract and verbal, no progress can be made and no conclusions can be drawn. But as soon as one commits to action rather than abstractions, something happens. Just as one finds the cat either dead or alive when the box is opened, so one finds a living or dead deity when one engages actively. What one finds is not simply a function of what’s going on “out there.” It is equally a function of what one brings to the activity of looking. We tend to find what we are looking for. At the very least, the God question is answered experientially, not intellectually. For the blind man who said after Jesus had left town that “I was blind, and now I see,” his new faith was based on an experience, not argumentation. Before the experience, no argument would have convinced him. After the experience, no argument was necessary.